And speaking of SHARE: Jeff Gould, director of research for Interop Systems, attended the event and came away realizing a couple of important things:

"Cobol is not dead. And neither is the mainframe"

If the State of California budget team had been at the event, they might have seen some ways to save money

According to Jeff, the California Controller is keeping money in the state budget to pay for Cobol development, claiming that the language is dead, there is no way to modernize mainframe applications, and that the only thing to do is to keep throwing money at the problem.

Dead wrong, says Jeff. Here's part of what he wrote: "In the past few years a whole new class of mainframe applications has emerged which bring non-mainframe environments such as Java and Linux to Big Iron. WebSphere on z, Linux on z – these are much more than mere checkbox options in some ... marketing scheme. A substantial chunk of the 10,000 or so System z mainframes in the world are actually running these environments. And they are doing it for big-time production apps too, not just development."